This is the biggest picture Ive done so far. I painted it with the canvas still unstretched, stapled to a wall in the studio in Caunes.

I was just getting started on my novel Hylozoic, which features a newlywed couple called Jayjay and Thuy. Hylozoic is the second in a trilogy of novels, the first of which is Postsingular; and the third of which will be called (probably) Transfinite.

Hylozoic is a word referring to the philosophical doctrine that everything is alive: rocks, atoms, stars. The scattered globs of light in this painting are there to represent the notion that in a hylozoic world the very air currents are alive.

Thanks to time travel, Jayjay has been getting painting lessons from no less a master than Hieronymus Bosch (so of course the picture has to be a triptych.) And thats the back of Thuy Nguyens head in the front; she has long pigtails.

I was hoping to put giant flying alien manta rays into Hylozoic, so here I painted one of them here to get a feel for what theyre like. The aliens are collectively and individually known as 'the Hrull,', and this particular manta is named Duxie.

The figure inside the Hrull is another of my characters, a boy called Chu. All three of these humans appeared in my novel Postsingular as well. Chu and the Hrull are about to pick up Jayjay and Thuy and take them back to the present time on Earth to save our planet from some other alien invaders called th Peng. But never mind about that.. The main thing here is the colors.

It was tough bringing this painting back on the airplane from France; I rolled it up inside some foam rubber and managed to talk the stewardesses into letting me park it in a little closet that they had for their coats.

Born in Kentucky in 1946, he studied mathematics, earning a Ph. D. in the theory of infinite sets. He worked first as mathematics professor, then as a computer science professor, coming to rest in Silicon Valley, where he now paints, photographs, and writes novels full time.

Rucker has published over 30 books, mostly speculative fiction. A founder of the cyberpunk school of literature, Rucker also writes in a realistic/fantastic style known as transrealism. Rucker took up painting in 1999 while doing research for his historical novel about the life of Peter Bruegel, As Above, So Below. He often paints pictures as a way of imagining the worlds of his novels such as The Hacker and Ants, The Hollow Earth, Frek and the Elixir and Mathematicians in Love. and Postsingular.